Coal industry video slams ‘frustrating’ EPA, backs up Romney energy speech

Coal industry video slams ‘frustrating’ EPA, backs up Romney energy speech

The coal industry is hitting back against attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who highlighted the Obama administration’s energy policies during a campaign stop in Colorado. Those policies, he said, are hostile toward coal.

A video released Friday by America’s Power, a coal industry-funded advocacy group, focused on the towns of Nucla and Naturita, Colo., where proposed regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency threaten to close a coal mine and a coal plant. The regulations cover mercury emissions and other pollutant standards.

If the EPA’s proposed rules were passed, the plants would be unable to afford the upgrades necessary to continue operation, leaving what one local business owner called “a ghost town.”

“If you wipe out those 150 jobs, when you’ve only got a town of 600 people, you’re going to have a ghost town and that’s going be all there is to it,” Apothecary Shoppe owner Don A. Colcord said in the video.

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